Emergency response organizations increasingly depend on wireless communication technology to provide communication during emergencies. Disadvantageously, however, emergencies often result in damage to, or sometimes even destruction of, existing network infrastructure, thereby preventing communications between emergency personnel. In other words, the existing communications infrastructure lacks survivability. Furthermore, even if portions of the existing communications infrastructure do survive the emergency, the existing communications infrastructure may not be able to handle the increased traffic load typical during emergencies. Specifically, remaining portions of the existing communication infrastructure may be overloaded as emergency personnel, and the general public, attempt various types of communications. Such deficiencies became clear during the events of Sep. 11, 2001, and again during the events of Hurricane Katrina.
In order to support mobility of a mobile device across base stations (e.g., from a base station currently serving the user device to a neighboring base station), the mobile device must know the identity of neighboring base stations. Without such neighboring base station information, the mobile device must instead search for all possible base stations in the area which could potentially serve the mobile device, a process which consumes an enormous amount of resources. Disadvantageously, while an accurate neighbor list reduces the search space for the mobile device during a handoff, neighbor lists are currently created manually, which is quite a laborious process. Furthermore, in mobile wireless networks in which base stations are mobile, base station neighbors change much more often than in fixed wireless networks in which base stations are fixed and, thus, manually created neighbor lists quickly become outdated.